Having good classroom management strategies, is essential if you want to get the most out of the limited time you have with your students. Classroom management is about identifying the ‘critical moments’ of a lesson that need addressing to create an effective learning environment.
Rather than establishing rules and reward systems, let’s think about creating an effective learning environment where learners are actively engaged. A lot of natural, genuine communication takes place while managing a group of learners that provides them with comprehensible input, so keeping instructions and classroom language in English increases the opportunities for language to be acquired and practised.
Here are five simple strategies to implement to help you manage your primary classroom: Continue reading
Most teachers have been there. One student disagrees with your answer and next, other learners start to disagree, ‘that’s not what you told us last week, teacher….’ Suddenly you are no longer sure if what you told them is actually correct. Even though moments of self-doubt can be healthy to keep teachers on their toes, moments like this can also make teachers feel less positive about their teaching abilities and affect teacher confidence. 
We know that there are lots of opportunities from technology in ELT – but we also see examples of technology doing what we know isn’t good from a teaching point of view. How can we make sure technology is working for teachers, and that teachers are really benefitting from new developments?
There are many ways to assess learners, for example, mini-tests or observations, in order to evaluate and monitor their understanding and progress. As well as checking learners’ competencies in some specific language or skill, evaluation allows us to guide learners on how to improve. Part of this is noting any errors they make in completing the assessments, especially errors in the language they use. However, focusing on errors too much can be de-motivating for learners. They may struggle to improve because they are anxious about making mistakes, especially with productive tasks. So how can we correct English errors and at the same time keep learners motivated to improve? 
I recently participated in a LIVE event on social media to discuss questions about